Support

Home Support Item

How do I clear the Windows Explorer icon cache?

When working with icons on Windows, you may sometimes fail to see changes to the icon being reflected on the desktop or in Windows Explorer. The reason is because Windows Explorer keeps a cache of icons.

A quick way to clear this cache is to go to the Appearance tab of Desktop properties and change the default icon size. If the current size is 32, change it to 33 then press the Apply button. After all the disk activity settles down, change the size back to 32, and apply again.

If that doesn’t work, you should also try rebooting the system. That’s guaranteed to flush the cache :-)